


out of the chaos of my doubt

by ssstrychnine



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 10:24:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6191377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>michonne considers things she misses. set during the weeks between s06e09 and 10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	out of the chaos of my doubt

Michonne doesn’t often dwell on the things she misses. It’s easier to do in Alexandria than anywhere else they’ve been, because there are places where you can’t see the walls, places where, in sunlight and plain clothes, you might almost forget what’s behind them, but it’s not something she searches out, not something she finds useful for her survival. Things creep in, of course, and she accepts them and she moves on. Once upon a time it would have stopped her in her tracks, pulled her back to feral solitude, but she’s put together a new family and they hold her closer than the dead do.

But there are things missing, things that might never exist again, like movies that haven’t already been cut or music that hasn’t already been recorded. The things _she_ misses aren’t anything like that, though she thinks she ought to, the things she misses are always far more boring. A few days after Carl is hurt she spends a night in bed awake thinking about hanging laundry, a chore she’d always hated. Mike had had strong opinions on the correct way to hang a collared shirt or a sundress and she never did it right. By her reasoning it all got dry in the end, no matter the number of pegs you used or whether it hung from the ankles or the waistband. She hated the clammy feeling of wet sleeves sticking to her wrists. She hated running out of pegs. But in bed in Alexandria it’s something so mundane she aches for it and in the morning she volunteers for laundry duty and she hates it and it feels impossibly _good_.

“You should hang those from the ankles,” she tells Tara, who is fumbling with a pair of jeans, and she rolls her eyes but does as she’s told. 

This is what it feels like to start again, Michonne thinks, carefully shaking out a t-shirt, and perhaps with Rick’s renewed faith they’ll even last a little while this time. Perhaps she'll have time to realise that pegs are disappearing or socks will lose their pairs and she’ll be blissfully annoyed all over again. 

Rick has been at Carl’s bedside since Daryl burned the horde of walkers up like kindling. Michonne sits with them too sometimes, because the room looks empty with just the two of them. She leaves her sword and her gloves and she holds Judith while Rick talks and Carl sleeps. He is awake more often now and he talks back sometimes and Denise tells them he’s going to be alright, he’s mostly just in shock. Michonne starts going out on runs again, usually with Daryl, and she brings him chocolate when she can and he eats it when the meds he’s on make him too nauseous to eat anything else.

Michonne tries not to think too hard about the way Carl had been injured. It reminds her of the Governor and then it reminds her of Andrea and then it reminds her of a horse she’d seen once that was missing an eye. It's skin had been stretched across the socket and stitched up neatly but it still looked like a nightmare. She hasn't seen Carl's wound since the night it happened, just the red stained edges of bandages, but she feels partly responsible for it all the same. If she’d been closer or faster or better able to see through the blind fear that came with her family being threatened. She knows she is responsible for a different family being wiped out entirely.

“Jessie was sweet,” she tells Rick, inadequately.

“She was,” he says in a voice that leaves no room for anything more. Michonne brushes a hand across the breadth of his shoulders, a touch that should be casual but feels like lightning, and leaves the room.

Carl gets well enough to move out of the infirmary and back into their house across the street. Tara moves in with Denise and Daryl takes a place on Carol’s couch and ignores anyone who raises an eyebrow. Michonne thinks about how it’s her and Rick and Carl and Judith all in a house together and she thinks about how easy it is to call them her family and she thinks about what Deanna had asked her before she died. _What do you want?_ She misses the way a bed looks when two people have slept there. Crumpled pillows and cast aside sheets. The casual intimacy of it. She starts to make her bed first thing every morning and the lines she presses into the sheets are sharp and straight and clean. Because Rick had Jessie and then he didn’t and his kids need to come first. 

Maggie gathers up a team to draw up plans for new walls and gardens. Michonne and Rick work out a guard roster and a run roster and Carol takes inventory and makes a list of things they need the most. Denise teaches Tara how to stitch a wound. Everything gets back somewhere close to normal, as normal as it can, and Michonne has never stopped thinking that it’s possible, because it has to be, but it’s a comfort to see the tension fall out of Rick’s shoulders as their days slow down. They talk in the evenings, quiet and warm, about the days they’ve had, good or bad or boring. Sometimes Carl will be there, Judith on his knee, and he’ll tell them that he’s sort of figuring out how his vision works now and Michonne marvels at how calm he is about all of it.

“You can be angry, you know,” she tells him, away from Rick, putting Judith down for the night.

“Being angry won’t give me my eye back,” he replies, simple enough, and he kisses his sleeping sister and touches Michonne’s shoulder and disappears into his room.

Michonne heads downstairs to where Rick is sitting, sprawled across the couch. She doesn’t sit next to him, though there is room, she takes the overstuffed armchair across from him and curls her legs up under her. Rick has his eyes closed, his head tilted back, his collar open. She watches him for a moment, the way the light hits his face, the shadows under his eyes, how his hands are held behind his head, his fingers tangled in his hair. When he opens his eyes she looks away, she studies the dirt under her fingernails and thinks that she definitely misses manicures.

“They alright?” Rick asks, sitting up, resting his elbows on his knees, leaning toward her.

“Mm,” she hums. “I think Carl’s struggling.”

“Me too,” he sighs. 

“I was thinking I might take him out with me, not far, just outside the walls, so he feels like he can again.” 

Rick is silent and for a split second Michonne thinks she’s stepped over some invisible line. She’s assumed too much about where she fits in with them and Rick is going to have to explain to her that she isn’t Carl’s mother, that Lori is dead, that she can’t take the place she left, and she’s going to have to find some way to respond to that. She’ll apologise, she’ll step back, she knows it’s true, how could she not? She isn’t anyone's mother. But then Rick is nodding and smiling, this gentle expression like half-caught sunlight.

“Yeah, you should,” he says easily. “It’ll be good coming from you too, less forced.” 

Michonne relaxes a little, allows herself to smile too. Her fears seem ridiculous already, like they're beyond small hurts like this. There are ways they are family and ways they aren't and all Michonne knows is that she loves them. All of them. She looks at Rick and he is watching her in one of the ways he does, half a smile and hooded eyes, and she thinks she has not felt like this since before. She hadn’t known she could feel like this again. Happy and unafraid. She stands up and before she can stop herself she’s by his side and leaning down and pressing her lips to the rise of his cheekbone. Just once and for only a moment.

“Goodnight Rick,” she says and she leaves him in the warm living room and goes to bed. 

She lies awake for a long time, listening to the sounds the house makes. She wonders what the first sign would be if something went wrong outside, metal screaming into the night, footsteps under her window. Then she shakes that from her mind and focuses on the house again. She can hear Rick downstairs, the floorboards creaking under him. He’s still wearing his boots, she thinks, perhaps he’s done what she had and calculated the time it takes to put them on in a hurry. She’d decided on taking them off and it gets easier every time she steps into the house. 

He comes upstairs and she listens for his footsteps, the way he drags his feet a little, the toe of one boot hitting a step, scuffing the carpet. She thinks he must be tired, she thinks perhaps he’ll always be tired. She hears him stop outside her door and she’s sure he must be able to hear her breathing, choked up under her breastbone. She closes her eyes and imagines a night where he knocks on her door and she lets him in and he steps through the doorway and kisses her. One hand would be pressed to her lower back, the other at her jaw and she would smile under his lips and he would press his face against her neck. She imagines that happening with her breath held, waiting for him to raise his hand and knock so quietly she almost won’t hear it. But he doesn’t, everything is silent for a hundred heartbeats and then the floor creaks again as he walks away and his bedroom door opens and closes and it’s silent again. Michonne lets out all her breath, rolls her eyes, scrubs at her face with her hands until she feels less ridiculous. She misses touching someone without violence. She misses a hand at her elbow, guiding her around a room, or a goodbye kiss at the beginning of the day, so casual it isn’t thought about it’s just done, like breathing. She misses being wanted. She sighs and turns to her side, shuts her eyes and goes to sleep. 

In the morning it seems absurd. She looks at the walls, the names painted there, the plain wooden grave markers, and it’s absurd that she should fantasise about anyone. But of course they’re trying to get back to normalcy and maybe that’s a part of it, allowing yourself to want something more than survival. That’s what Deanna had said. Perhaps she’ll never be able to want something without telling herself she shouldn’t. She misses art. She misses being frivolous. 

She leaves Alexandria with Carl in the early afternoon and he walks slowly, carefully, and he flinches at shadows. 

“I see things sometimes,” he tells her, in the quiet of a clearing in sunlight. “Shapes and-and colours.” 

“Denise said that’s common,” Michonne murmurs. “Your brain forgetting that your eye is gone.” 

Carl nods, tilts his hat back, touches the bandage over his eye lightly with the tips of his fingers. His mouth twists down and he drops his hand and walks ahead. He has a gun at his belt though she hasn’t seen him shoot anything since he was injured. It’s as good a reason as any to keep him behind the walls, she thinks, but she knows he wouldn’t accept it. He’s been content looking after Judith while he heals, but something will happen like it always does and he’ll be at Rick’s side before anyone. 

“We’ll practice shooting some time,” she says, following him. “Using a knife. It might be different.” 

Carl hums in agreement and picks his way carefully through the trees. 

In the evenings she starts to take a place on the couch next to Rick. They are closer every night, she is sure of it. There is space between them the first time and then, slowly, there isn’t. They touch at hips and thighs and knees. Their shoulders press together and she leans her head on his shoulder sometimes, like she’s too wary to stay upright. She keeps her fantasies behind her bedroom door and she sits with him on the couch, flush against his side. She can’t believe how good it feels, just to touch like that. Happy and unafraid. 

She isn’t surprised when he kisses her and she can’t imagine he is either. They’ve been dancing through Alexandria for weeks. Through the apocalypse for months. It’s plucked right from her head, she laughs and he smiles, and there’s so much time behind it it’s almost overwhelming. She can’t do much but laugh and his expression is so gentle she feels she ought to hit him but she kisses him again instead. 

There are things from the old world Michonne will always miss. She doesn’t dwell on them but they’re there, comfortable in the back of her head, small hurts, mostly healed. She misses art and being frivolous. She misses manicures. But the things she misses the most she has now; someone to touch, someone who wants her, a family and no doubt that they’re hers. A slept in bed. She hangs out laundry with Tara and Rick walks passed, touches her waist, her hand.

“You should hang that the other way round,” he tells her, nodding at a shirt, and she laughs and rolls her eyes and leaves it exactly how it is.

**Author's Note:**

> ok ok i tried to write something longer than the tiny tiny richonne fic i have on tumblr. this is a little bit longer. im @oneangryshot come and say hello! come and cry cos these kids are so cute! thanks for reading!


End file.
